Behind my friends' house
there's a bank absolutely covered with flowering strawberry plants, a small section of
which you can see above.

Unfortunately, the abundant harvest the blossoms seem to promise never develops. The
flowers simply dry up and fall off. The reason is that no efforts have been made to
cultivate the plants for years, but a strawberry plant produces good fruit for only two or
three years. New plants produced at the rooting tips of its stolons can be transplanted
and they'll do well, but the mother plant loses its vigor. Its flowers make bees happy,
and that's it. Happily, we've transplanted lots of young plants to new beds so before long
we should be having fresh strawberries.

Strawberry "fruits" are bizarre things but they can be understood by looking
at the flowers from which they come. In the world of flowers, the simplest blossoms are
those containing a single pistil, comprising the stigma, style and ovary -- the female
parts. You may want to review basic flower structure at http://www.backyardnature.net/fl_stand.htm.

Individual strawberry flowers depart from
that basic one-pistil arrangement by bearing many pistils. A diagram showing the two
different configurations -- a flower with one pistil and another with many -- is -- is
shown at the right.

Now take a look at the strawberry flower cross-section below:

The tallest items topped by golden horseshoe thingies are pollen-producing male
stamens. Notice how they arise around the female parts in the flower's center. So far
that's like our Standard Blossom. Now notice that at the very center of the flower I've
cut across a little hill composed of nothing but undifferentiated tissue, and covering the
hillock are numerous oval, shiny things. Each shiny thing is topped by a slender, yellow,
matchstick-like item. The shiny things are ovaries and the sticklike things are
stigma-tipped styles -- in other words, the little hill is covered with many pistils. The
hillock in the picture's center is called the receptacle.

In most flowers the pistil matures into the fruit. With strawberry flowers there's a
whole different story. Look at the next close-up, which shows an older flower after the
white petals have fallen off, below:

In that picture the receptacle is beginning to enlarge tremendously causing the pistils
to become more and more separated from one another. The spongy-looking sphere is the
receptacle. The pistils themselves are maturing into special kinds of fruits called
achenes, which are dry, one-seeded fruits that don't split open upon maturity.
The sunflower "seeds" we eat are also achenes. Each achene in the picture is
accompanied by the brown, shriveling-up remains of the stigma-tipped style. At the bottom
of the spongy receptacle you can see remains of shriveled stamens.

So, you can already guess that the green, spongy receptacle in
the above picture is going to enlarge even much more, eventually will turn soft, juicy and
red, until it forms the strawberry shown at the right.

When we bite into that receptacle, the strawberry, the soft-gritty little things that
may get stuck in our teeth -- the pale grains covering the red strawberry -- are achenes,
and those achenes are the actual strawberry fruits we'd sow if we wanted to grow
strawberries from seed!